The vast (and masochistic!) left-wing conspiracy

This morning’s news of a second lawsuit alleging the transmission of funds from Nasser Kazeminy to Norm Coleman poses serious complications for Coleman’s “they’re out to get me” defense. Coleman can and probably will claim that this is just further evidence of the vast left-wing conspiracy to do him in, but that seemed unlikely yesterday (“Five reasons to doubt it’s all just sleazy politics”) and seems exponentially more unlikely today.

For starters, the plaintiff in the first suit alleging improper payments to Coleman, Paul McKim, is a defendant in the second suit alleging improper payments to Coleman. When Coleman’s accusers start suing each other, it puts a serious dent in Norm’s case that they are all conspiring together to bring about his downfall.

Second, the filing of this second lawsuit buttresses McKim’s original claim that he filed the lawsuit not to harm Norm Coleman but in part to protect himself from the claims of angry investors in his company.

So, uh, how would Norm know when the Star Tribune learned about the lawsuit?

The most interesting passage in Coleman’s statement yesterday — and the linchpin of its implication that “Al Franken and his political allies” were involved somehow — was this one:

Let me tell you how this arose. This is not about public documents researched by an investigative reporter. No. Sometime last week, even before this Texas lawsuit was originally filed, a copy of false allegations were delivered in Minnesota in an unmarked envelope to two Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters. I want to repeat that: Sometime last week, even before this Texas lawsuit was originally filed, a copy of false allegations were delivered in Minnesota in an unmarked envelope to two Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters.

David Brauer at MinnPost talked to the Star Tribune’s deputy managing editor, Rene Sanchez, on Friday and asked whether the Strib had indeed received an advance copy of the lawsuit. Sanchez said no.

On the face of it, that would seem to suggest Coleman was making things up. Not necessarily so. Coleman didn’t say that the paper received the lawsuit (that is, the formal legal complaint) before it was filed; he said someone sent the paper “a copy of the allegations.” I have also heard the paper received an anonymous piece of mail prior to the filing of the suit, as I wrote yesterday, though I have not yet spoken to anyone who will confirm being the recipient.

There’s strong circumstantial reason to think the paper knew the lawsuit was coming. Consider first that it was filed on Monday in Texas. And by midday Wednesday, reporters Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy were at a Coleman campaign event in St. Cloud trying to ask Coleman about it. McEnroe was brandishing a copy of the legal complaint, which he and Kennedy had clearly read and digested by then.

I can attest that the lawsuit was impossible to find through Google or even the subscription legal database Pacer, because once Minnesota Independent had heard about it, Paul Demko and I spent a considerable amount of time looking for it. (The lawsuit and its accompanying exhibits are online, we learned later, but only through a registration-required database at the level of the Texas county court system.) Bottom line: You couldn’t have known it existed, much less found it, without knowing where to look.

So it appears the Strib did get a heads-up of some sort; the timeline affords no other conclusion that I can see. This question of who knew what when matters for one reason: How did Sen. Norm Coleman become privy to any information about what the Star Tribune had or hadn’t received?

It would be one thing if the reporters on the story chose to volunteer information like that in the course of working their sources in the Coleman camp. But that didn’t happen, according to one of the two reporters who have been on the story, Paul McEnroe. When I phoned McEnroe, he refused to discuss his sourcing but did say this: “Nobody sent an anonymous package to me or Tony. And Tony and I have never talked to anyone in the Coleman campaign about where we get our information. We have no idea what he based that statement on. If he cares to share it, we’d love to hear from him about it.”

Does the Coleman campaign have a special friend at the Star Tribune? And if so, who?

Why bury the lede when you can bury the whole story?

I haven’t seen the print edition of Saturday’s Star Tribune bearing the Paul McEnroe/Tony Kennedy story about lawsuit number two, but check out the packaging it got online:

See anything wrong with the packaging? Like, say, it’s completely misleading? The headline gives the reader no idea that a second lawsuit is afoot; it extracts a phrase from the denial that Norm Coleman offered before the story of the second lawsuit even broke. Thus a consequential story is packaged as if it only contains information that readers following the matter would presume they had already seen in Friday’s news cycle.

Why didn’t they just headline it “Nothing to see here, folks”?

A sixth reason to doubt that it’s all just “sleazy politics”

After I wrote the Five Reasons post yesterday, I realized I’d overlooked something obvious that militates against Norm Coleman’s position that he’s just an innocent victim here: his behavior when first asked about the lawsuit on Wednesday. Everyone following this story has seen by now the video of Star Tribune reporters trying in vain to interview Coleman through a closed SUV window (now part of an ad, as Chris Steller noted here today), but only Rachel Stassen-Berger of the Pioneer Press has noted what happened next (emphasis added):

Coleman’s [Wednesday campaign schedule] was diverted Wednesday after reporters questioned him during his St. Cloud stop about a lawsuit filed against Coleman contributor Nasser Kazeminy. Coleman walked out of the St. Cloud restaurant where he had just finished his stump speech and jumped into his SUV without answering questions.

Shortly thereafter, reporters traveling with Coleman got word from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who had spent the past two days on the road with him, that the senator was canceling the rest of his Wednesday stops and heading back to the Twin Cities. Within an hour, Pawlenty called reporters to say Coleman would resume his campaign trip.

If there was a reasonable explanation, why was Coleman’s initial impulse to bunker down?

Two questions

If Coleman, and therefore also Nasser Kazeminy, are being baselessly slandered here, why is Kazeminy remaining silent?

And why isn’t anyone from Hays Companies addressing the matter of the Hays billing to plaintiff Paul McKim’s company, Deep Marine Technologies, that’s attached to the legal complaint? If there’s a legitimate explanation, now would be an exceptionally good time to proffer it.